The subject matter disclosed herein relates generally to energy device networks and, more specifically, to systems and methods for use in communicating with an energy management device in a network of energy devices.
At least some known energy devices are capable of exchanging information with other devices using a network. For example, an appliance may receive energy rate information from a utility provider system or transmit energy consumption information to a monitoring device.
Such information may be collected and processed by an energy management device, and reports describing overall and per-device energy consumption, for example, may be provided to a user. However, accessing energy information provided by an energy management device may require a user device to be manually configured, such as by entering a network address of the energy management device. This manual configuration may introduce delay, inconvenience, and/or a risk of data entry errors into the process of using the energy management device. Further, while an energy management device may be made discoverable by an automatic discovery protocol, a user device may be unable to discover the energy management device using such a protocol due to a lack of support for the protocol at the user device and/or a software conflict, such as security (e.g., firewall) software that prevents the user device from using such a protocol.